854: The Six Epochs of Intelligence Evolution
13:56 Share

This is episode number 854 on the six epochs of intelligence evolution.

Welcome back to the Super Data Science Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Krohn. Let's start off with a couple recent reviews of the show. The first review is an Apple podcast review from someone named Tangled Up in Data. And so Tangled Up in Data wrote that SDS is one of their few must-listen podcasts, engaging, interesting, entertaining, and useful for people at all levels of the data science and technology spectrum.

Cool. Thanks for that review, Tangled Up in Data. They also had some interesting points about a film that I mentioned in episode number 845, a film called The Town, starring Ben Affleck. And yeah, there's some interesting facts about the film in that review that you can read if you'd like.

Our second review comes from someone named Jose Aguilera, who is an enterprise risk insights manager for a firm called Westpac in Sydney, Australia. And Jose says, I'm a big fan of the Super Data Science podcast. I think it's the best one out there on all things AI, ML, and DS. Cool.

Thanks Tangled Up in Data and Jose. Thanks for all the recent ratings and feedback that everyone's providing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all the other podcasting platforms out there, as well as for likes and comments on our YouTube videos. As a bit of friendly competition, regular listeners may know that I've guest co-hosted the excellent Last Week in AI podcast half a dozen times, and both regular hosts of that show, Andre and Jeremy, have been my guests on the Super Data Science podcast. Well,

Despite their show last week in AI being many years younger than the Superdita Science Podcast, they are closing in on us

in terms of their number of Apple podcast ratings. At the time of recording this episode, we have 282 ratings and they just passed 250. So help me stay ahead of Andre and Jeremy by heading to your podcast app and rating the Super Data Science Podcast bonus points if you leave written feedback in the Apple podcast app. If you do that, I will be sure to read your feedback on air like I did today's reviews. Okay, all right.

Now on to the meat of today's five minute ish Friday episode. And so this episode is on the six epochs of intelligence evolution. I came across the definition of these six stages in the futurist Ray Kurzweil's latest book, The Singularity is Nearer. This is a great book, and I've got a link to it in the show notes if you're interested in reading the whole thing. But let's focus on something that he talks about right in the beginning is in the opening pages. So

So per Kurzweil, each of the six stages of intelligence builds on the complexity of the information processing that's possible in the preceding stage. So the third epoch depends on the second one happening and the second epoch depends on the first.

The first epoch of intelligence, according to Ray Kurzweil, began a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, when negatively charged electrons began circling stably around a positively charged core of protons and neutrons. These stable structures are called atoms and include things like hydrogen, helium, and carbon, all the types of atoms that are enumerated by the periodic table of elements.

Billions of years after atoms formed, these atoms began combining together to form molecules, which have infinite complexity and so can store elaborate information. Carbon, for example, is a particularly useful atomic building block because carbon atoms can form long, stable chains while also forming strong bonds with other types of atoms like hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen.

It's wild that we live in a universe where even this level of stable information complexity is possible. If physical constants like gravity, electron mass, or proton charge were off by the tiniest, slightest amount of where they are in our particular universe, atoms and molecules wouldn't be able to form. I'm not religious.

But I am always in awe and wonder when I ponder how tremendously improbable it is that the universe came to be with these just right Goldilocks physical constraints in place. There's mystery behind this that I guess no one may ever know.

Even wilder than that is that seemingly through random chance and factors like lightning strikes, ultraviolet radiation from the sun, and delivery by meteorites, stable chains of carbon and other atoms eventually happen to form on Earth. So through countless further random interactions over long stretches of time, a particularly complex information storage molecule called

called ribonucleic acid, or RNA for short, began to form. If RNA sounds familiar, it's probably because of DNA, which evolved later.

DNA has two strands that are very stable in their famous double helix structure, while RNA only has a single strand. This single strand structure makes RNA less stable than DNA, but it also makes RNA, it allows RNA to actively perform work, such as smoothing along chemical reactions, even catalyzing the formation of other RNA molecules.

Now, RNA molecules aren't alive, but once they could self-replicate, RNA did allow for the process of natural selection to occur, despite, yeah, so natural selection could occur despite RNA molecules not being alive.

And that natural selection ends up happening because more efficient RNA molecules were more likely to survive and propagate, gradually allowing RNA and the information stored within RNA molecules to become more and more complex. Again, super wild, mind-blowing stuff, but it likely took millions of years and vast numbers of failed attempts and dead ends for RNA to become a self-replicating information store. So yeah.

To recap, the first of six epochs of intelligence involved the development of atoms and molecules, including extremely complex information-storing molecules like RNA.

The second epoch of intelligence began several billion years ago with the emergence of life on Earth. Very quickly, I'll try to do this as quickly as possible, scientists believe life emerged from RNA by RNA developing the ability to synthesize proteins, which are complex molecules that can form an extremely wide variety of different types of work.

RNA and these proteins happen to become trapped in spontaneously formed fatty acid bubbles to form what scientists call protocells, so early cells. Natural selection favored protocells with increasingly stable containment structures or membranes, you know, those fatty acid bubble structures so that, you know, the more stable the membrane and the more stable the information storage mechanisms such as developing double helix DNA.

Through processes that I'm not going to take the time to get into today, eventually these protocells evolved into single-celled living organisms, which themselves evolved into multicellular living organisms. So yeah, so the first epoch of intelligence was the development of physics and chemistry. The second was biological life.

In the third epoch of intelligence, animals described by DNA formed simple nervous systems and eventually brains, allowing animals to store and process information in real time.

Brains provided animals with strong evolutionary advantages, and so animals developed more and more complexity in their brains over many millions of years. In the fourth epoch, which began only a few thousand years ago, a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms, we've otherwise been talking about millions or even billions of years of gradual evolution, and here we're just talking about thousands of years.

So yeah, in the fourth epoch, which began only a few thousand years ago, humans with their uniquely complex brains and their opposable thumbs began physically recording information outside of their brains. Through writing systems on clay tablets, papyrus, and eventually modern information technology like magnetic tape and solid state hard drives, humans augmented their internal information storage systems with external information storage systems.

In recent decades, and particularly in just the past few years, humans devised machine learning approaches that also enable us to not only augment our information storage, but also supplement humans' abilities to perceive and reason about information.

In an accelerating and increasingly diverse range of examples in recent years, these intelligent machines have come to exceed human cognitive capabilities. It seems likely that even through simply scaling the methods that we already have, such as by increasing by further orders of magnitude the number of model parameters, inference time compute, and dataset size, machines will continue to surpass humans on more and more complex cognitive tasks.

In only a few years, for example, scientific discovery may be led by machines more than by humans. Interesting times we live in indeed. Even more interesting is that we are at this very moment beginning the fifth epoch, in which biological human cognition merges directly with the speed and vastness of digital technology.

Instead of interacting with artificial intelligence indirectly through screens, keyboards, headphones, and microphones, a small number of humans now interface directly with AI systems through brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs for short.

Today, with the fifth epoch of intelligence in its infancy, BCIs are typically implanted only in severe healthcare situations such as paralysis or motor function loss due to say spinal cord injury or stroke. As the fifth epoch accelerates over the coming decades, however, it will be possible for ordinary human's brains to be directly augmented by non-biological computers that will vastly increase our memory capacity and our capacity for complex abstract thought.

Whoa. This is the precipice upon which we stand today and the radically different future that myself, perhaps you, and certainly many thousands of listeners to this podcast are bringing about ourselves through our AI model development and our application development. That is trippy.

Um, yeah, so those were the, uh, yeah. So the first five epochs of Kurzweil's intelligence evolution, um, involve physics and chemistry is the first one. Biological life is the second brains is the third technologies, the fourth, and then the merger of human technology with intelligence that we're beginning to impart upon today is that fifth epoch, but there's a sixth and the sixth. I, I,

is frankly something that I'm not really able to grasp. And it's certainly the most speculative of all of Ray Kurzweil's evolutionary development of intelligence theories. In this sixth epoch, Ray Kurzweil has intelligence spreading beyond Earth and beginning to influence the structure and destiny of the entire universe.

The basic patterns of the universe become optimized for intelligence, and intelligence gains the ability to restructure matter at the most fundamental levels. Kurzweil theorizes that every particle in the universe could become part of a vast intelligent network, with physical constraints like the speed of light and quantum mechanics becoming the only constraints upon how much computation is possible within the universe. In this view, individual intelligences merge into a unified cosmic intelligence,

The distinction between biological and artificial intelligence completely disappears, and consciousness becomes a universal phenomenon. That might be completely wild conjecture, but Ray Kurzweil has been remarkably prescient about the pace of the development of AI over recent decades, so perhaps there's something to his dramatic vision for the future of intelligence. Yeah, with, uh, yeah. So in that sixth stage, uh,

Um, yeah, to recap one final time, the sixth epochs of Kurtzweil's, uh, evolutionary development of intelligence involve one physics and chemistry to biological life, three brains for technology, five, the merger of human technology with intelligence. And then six, the transformation of all inert matter in the cosmos into a substrate for consciousness and computation. That's pretty wild. Um,

But yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode, found it interesting. And yeah, I mean, I certainly really enjoyed making this episode and learning about these six epochs, thinking about them.

But yeah, that's it for today's episode. If you think if you know someone else who might enjoy this trippy episode, consider sharing it with them. Of course, leave a review of the show on your favorite podcasting platform. If you haven't already, feel free to tag me in a LinkedIn or Twitter post with your thoughts about today's episode and I'll respond to those.

And yeah, subscribe to the show if you're not a subscriber already. Most importantly, I just hope you'll keep on listening. Until next time, keep on rocking it out there. And I'm looking forward to enjoying another round of the Super Data Science Podcast with you very soon.